Get Scrappy

Get Scrappy, Smarter Digital Marketing for Businesses Big and Small, by Nick Westergaard, Amacom 2016

What does it take to be digitally savvy in the post-advertising age?  Author Nick Westergaard shows how you don't have to be General Motors or Perdue to create a memorable, competitive brand presence in all the media.  In fact, no one need know just exactly how small you are, because social media, well managed, will magnify your presence!

But, warns Westergaard, this new approach is not for faint-at-heart traditionalists.  You'll have to learn guerrilla digital methods, including - 

1.  Brains Before Budget.  Forget cheap shortcuts.  Scrappy markets look for smarter ways to get around challenges and do more with less;

2.  Market Like a Mousetrap.  The humble mousetrap is effective and efficient; it gets the job done with minimal expense.  That's what scrappy marketers aim to do. 

3.  See Ideas Everywhere. Scrappy marketers think beyond their own sector and gather insights from unexpected places.  They don't dismiss a brilliant B2C idea just because they're a B2B or a non-profit.  

Westergaard makes good use of Google as a dynamic, all-powerful marketing model.  Quoting Google's Eric Schmidt, he says, "Every two days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of time up until 2003."  Google's Zero Moment of Truth research tells us that consumers are now seeking out twice as many sources of content in support of purchase decisions compared to just a few years ago.  

For non-marketing readers this books works well to lay out the various media measures and methods. For instance, Westergaard creates a new digital media scorecard against which newbies can establish a baseline and move on from there:

*  key social metrics such as "share of voice"

*  key website metrics such as new visitors vs. returning or average time on site

*  follower/like counts

*  mentions with or without sentiment metrics

*  top content

*  Klout score

*  customer story/tweet of the month

*  Instagram photo of the month

At the end of Get Scrappy  are "Discussion Group Questions," a wonderful way to introduce and enlarge your organization's digital reach.  Also, the author offers 12 other sources in "For Further Reading."  

A very useful approach to digital media for beginners and those with some spotty experience.